We had the green light to leave.
With a little less trouble than the last time around, we stuffed Fudge back into the cage and delivered him to Stella. She agreed to watch out for us from the roof as we sneaked out the backdoor of the used clothing store, which was the closest exit to her garage. Once we were safely in her minivan, she would make sure to keep any wayward poxers distracted while we got what we needed from Chuck Peterson’s Hummer.
That was the plan.
Saying goodbye to Stella was hard. I couldn’t help feeling like we were never going to see her again. Even though Aunt Ella’s house was supposedly only a little ways up Route 2, we all felt like we were abandoning her and going to another country. She put the pile of books she gave Sanjay into a sack. I could tell she wanted to hug him goodbye, but she settled for giving Poopy Puppy a big hug and a kiss instead.
“Thank you,” said Prianka. “We will see you again. All of us.”
“Is that a promise?” said Stella.
“Pinky swear,” said Prianka. They hooked their pinkies together, but Prianka crumbled and squeezed Stella so tightly I thought her glasses were going to pop off her head.
Finally, we did the most important thing before we left. We sat Sanjay down and asked him one more time how to get to my Aunt Ella’s house.
“Sanjay,” I said. “We’re at 311 Main Street in Greenfield, Massachusetts. We need to get to 8 Captain Logan Way in Cummington, Massachusetts. Can you tell us how to get there?”
He sat on a kitchen chair with his feet dangling. His eyes looked far off to a point on the wall where there was nothing. After a moment, he consulted with Poopy Puppy. When he was done he said, “Route 2 north for 8.2 miles. Winchendon Road for 7.3 miles. Blackstone Street for .4 miles. Captain Logan Way for .1 mile. Poopy Puppy says so.”
Prianka wrote the directions down and handed me the paper. Jimmy shook his head in amazement. Stella smiled like she was doting over a favored grandchild. Trina calculated the math and announced to the rest of us that we only had 16 miles to go.
We said our goodbyes all over again. Then we took Stella’s extra set of keys which included a master key to the building, made sure that I had the Hummer’s keys at the ready, and were off to the used clothing store to get out of Dodge as quickly and quietly as we could.
40
MR. EMBRY, WHO owned the health food store and took care of Stella Rathbone’s minivan, must have been stuck in her garage since everything happened last Friday. I knew he was only one poxer, but none of us expected him to be there after we snuck out into the alley and quietly pulled up her garage door.
We all had lighters and paper ready, except for Sanjay, but the grandfatherly dude with the earring in his ear and the graying ponytail lunged at us as soon as the door opened.
“Mr. Embry,” screamed Stella from her perch three stories high, as he went straight for Trina. She wasn’t prepared, and he nearly bit her, but Jimmy thought fast and rammed into him from the side with his wheelchair. The old guy went sprawling, which gave us all enough time to torch up our wads and throw them at him. We all backed up as far as we could and watched him light up the alleyway before exploding.
Stella’s face disappeared from the rooftop. A moment later she was back.
“There are more in the park,” she yelled down to us. “I think they heard.” She held up the cage with Fudge. “I’ll keep them busy with the rooster. You all be safe.”
Then she was gone again.
The minivan was an ugly dark blue with Pennsylvania license plates. We piled in easily enough then shut and locked the doors. For some reason, Andrew insisted on sitting on the coffee cup holder that sat between the driver’s and passenger’s seats. The bird bugged me. I don’t know why. Maybe I didn’t like those deep black eyes or the fact that his brain was about the size of my little toenail, yet he still knew how to talk.
He just freaked me out, is all. Creepy creepy, you know?
I pulled the van out of the garage and turned right. We went to the end of the alley, hooked a left, and pretty soon we were around the building. There were black, tarry puddles of slime everywhere. That had to be our handiwork—the first time we took on a horde of poxers and won—rooster style.
I rolled up in front of Chuck’s Hummer, and we all hopped out of the car and surveyed the street. There were poxers past where we nuked the building. They had already eyeballed us and started heading our way. Up the street there were more.
“I figure we have just about a minute,” I told everyone as I pressed the open button on Chuck’s key ring, and we all started unloading the Hummer.
The girls focused on the kayak while I tossed bag after bag to Jimmy, and he threw them into the back of the minivan.
“Forty seconds,” yelled Trina, “I can’t get the ties undone”.
“Start a countdown,” Prianka ordered, and we all did.
“Thirty-nine, thirty-eight, thirty-seven, thirty-six . . .” At about twenty- two, Trina was in tears. Prianka kicked the side of the Hummer and told her to forget the damn boat. After all, Sanjay slept just fine underneath a wheelbarrow. He’d just have to learn to adjust. We all did.
Jimmy and I had the guns, our bags, and the food loaded into the minivan.
The poxers were closing in.
“Fourteen, thirteen, twelve . . .” We almost had it made until Prianka shrieked loud enough to make even the poxers stop for a second.
Sanjay was standing in the middle of the street.
He was dangling Poopy Puppy by one hand and waving at the advancing monsters with the other.
“Sanjay!” she pleaded, but it was too late. Within the space of those last twelve seconds they were practically on him.
My head swam with a thousand thoughts at once. How could he have gotten out of the minivan? Why did we let him get out of the minivan? What the hell was he thinking? None of those things mattered. We were going to lose him, the most vulnerable member of our little group, and there was nothing we could do. We were a million miles away from him, and the poxers were too close.
When they were near enough for Sanjay to realize that they weren’t people at all, he began to cry.
Andrew, who was also supposed to stay in the car, flew in front of the closest poxer to Sanjay and flapped his wings wildly. The rest of us ran into the crowd, tackling the poxers and dropping them to their knees while staying out of the way of gnashing teeth.
Our efforts bought us scant seconds.
Jimmy, flex-master that he was, literally picked up a poxer kid and threw him at a dude with plugs in his ears, which, by the way, is a totally poor fashion choice. The two fell to the ground in a pile of tangled limbs.
Trina had my dad’s crowbar in her hands. She swung the shaft wildly around like she was playing whack-a-mole.
Prianka was showing off her ninja moves like she did way back at the Mug N’ Muffin. I kissed that girl, I thought. Sometimes stray ideas like that can creep into your brain at the worst possible times. This was one of those times.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw the girl—the one that was going to get to Sanjay—the one that was going to end his brief existence and turn him into a mindless thing. She was only a yard or two away—a hipster with long tangled hair and a peacock colored top. She reached for Sanjay just as I got to him.
I grabbed for his arm, and so did she, but her hands missed. Instead they found Poopy Puppy, and she yanked the dirty, stuffed toy out of Sanjay’s clutches and brought it to her mouth like she hadn’t eaten in years.
I heaved Sanjay off the ground and tossed him over my shoulder, whipping his legs around and knocking another poxer off his feet.
Something sailed past my head, hit the ground, and tumbled.
It was Fudge the Rooster, without a cage and with no way to get back home to the hen house. He lan
ded on the pavement and immediately puffed up the feathers around his neck and started cock-fighting with anything that moved, which included us.
“Woot woot,” we heard Stella holler from the rooftop. “Am I a good shot or what?”
Prianka kicked the rooster toward her closest attacker, and Fudge clawed him in the groin with his talons.
Trina and Jimmy had already started back to the car with Andrew following after them. I pulled Sanjay away, narrowly missing two more poxers that reached for us. He squirmed violently in my arms.
“Poopy Puppy,” he screamed. “Poopy Puppy, Poopy Puppy.”
We were too late. There was nothing to do but scramble into the minivan.
I struggled to put Sanjay into the back seat. Prianka held on to him as he howled and wailed.
Safely locked inside, we all turned and watched in horror. The poxers had surrounded Fudge, snapping at each other and chasing after him like he was the last portion of the best thing on the menu.
Meanwhile the hipster chick tore Poopy Puppy apart in a vain attempt to find the part of the dog that was meat.
Sanjay kept on weeping then abruptly stopped and went completely mute. When I turned around, I saw that his eyes were glazed over and his face was frozen.
“Is he bitten,” I screamed. “Did he get bit?”
Prianka checked every inch of him. The boy who normally didn’t like to be touched did nothing as she examined him from head to foot.
He was fine—but he wasn’t.
He sat frozen, like he was a statue in a wax museum. No matter what any of us said—no matter what we did—he didn’t move.
He stayed like that for a long, long time.
41
WE FOLLOWED BACK streets that paralleled the main road to get out of the center of town. There were poxers everywhere, although not as many as we thought there would be. Jimmy was finally the one who came up with the idea that maybe a lot of them were too stupid to figure out how to get outside.
Just like the mother and daughter in the used closing store, they probably didn’t have the brains for door knobs, and unless there was meat to eat on the other side, smashing windows was past their intellectual capabilities, too.
“We really got to be careful when we go inside places,” he said. “There’s always a chance that we’ll run into the hungry dead.”
I thought about it for a moment. “Well, if they don’t have anything to eat, won’t they eventually just waste away?”
“Great,” said Prianka. “Anorexic zombies.” She sat in the middle seat with her hands in her lap, peering out the window as we drove past a particularly tacky house decorated early for Halloween. Sanjay stared into space, his eyes glazed. Andrew had chosen to leave the front of the minivan and now sat on his shoulder. He gently rubbed his head against Sanjay’s cheek like a dutiful dog.
It was selfish of me, but I couldn’t help thinking that we were lucky we got the directions to Aunt Ella’s house from Sanjay before everything happened. I could understand a little kid being upset about losing a stuffed animal, but Poopy Puppy was far more than just a toy to Sanjay. Like Prianka said, Poopy Puppy was Sanjay’s mouthpiece. Without him, he was mute, and none of us knew for how long.
I drove a few more blocks before taking a right and joining up with Main Street again. Finally, we were out of the center of town and away from Fall Fest.
“I know where we are,” said Jimmy. “I’ve been up this way before.” He directed us down a hill, which was a little harrowing considering there were a few pileups along the way. At the bottom, we passed a Chinese food place and a big white church.
Off in the distance, I could see the highway. An endless stretch of cars still marred the landscape in both directions, and there was movement everywhere, which meant that there were poxers.
My mind drifted back to the lady who was stuck in her car on Route 116. I bet when she woke up last Friday morning, the last thing she could have guessed was how the rest of her life would be. The look of horror on her face when she realized we weren’t going to save her will always be with me, like a piece of movie popcorn stuck in my teeth.
I frowned. Let’s not forget the movies. They were gone, too.
As we approached the underpass directly below the traffic jam, dozens of poxers on the highway above twirled their heads around and tracked the minivan with their dead eyes. There were more on the side of the road and in the underpass. When we went through, two of them shambled out right in front of us, and I hit them.
I didn’t even slow down.
Black blood splattered the windshield, so I turned on the wipers and pressed the button for the windshield wiper fluid.
“That’s gross,” said Trina as gore spread across her field of vision. “I can’t see.”
I flipped my hand. “What’s to see? It’s dead out there.”
No one laughed.
On the other side of the underpass was the entrance to a supermarket—one of those huge ones that had a salad bar and served pizza.
“A supermarket—that’s good to know,” said Jimmy. He was sitting behind Trina, so he reached forward and massaged her shoulder. “It’s just a little blood,” he whispered to her. She put her hand on his. I still wasn’t getting used to the whole idea of the two of them together.
Next to the supermarket was a shoe store, a pet mart and a coffee shop. A little hint of sadness swept over me as I thought about the animals in the pet place. I know, I know. What a softy, right? At least it wasn’t the kind of store that had puppies and kittens. Instead, they had what my parents always called ‘disposable pets’ like mice and gerbils and guppies—the kind adults give their kids when they’re five to teach them about responsibility.
What was worse? Starving to death in a cage with your friends or being tortured to death by a giant toddler. I think I’d pick starving.
“Ooh, shoes,” purred my sister.
“Yeah,” I said. “A nice set of practical pumps is exactly what you need right now.”
“Bite me, Tripp. And can we stop for a sec and wipe off the windshield? There’s gunk everywhere.”
I pressed the button for the windshield washing fluid again, but all it managed to do was make the ick a little wetter as it smeared across our field of vision.
“Just spritz the windshield a couple more times,” Jimmy said. “It should be fine.”
The dark stains eventually faded before disappearing. There was still some crusty junk left along the edges of the window. The first good rain would take care of that.
Past the supermarket, the road curved to the right, and buildings gave way to tall pine trees. As the road began to steadily climb, we passed a big, carved, wooden Indian head with a sign that said, ‘Welcome to the Mohawk Trail.’
I remembered the Indian from trips we had taken to see my aunt and uncle. It had a hard, totem pole face with a craggy nose and deep set eyes. Below the carving, a welcome sign said, ‘The Mohawk Trail, part of Massachusetts Route 2, was created as one of the United States’ first scenic highways. It passes close to Vermont on one side and the Mohawk Trail State Forest on the other. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.’
Surprisingly, there were relatively few cars on the road. I supposed that unless you lived off the Trail, you wouldn’t have thought to head north this way.
“I remember the Indian,” I said. “We’re not far.”
“We’re looking for a coffee shop,” said Trina. “That’s where we make the right.”
We followed the Trail as the road snaked up the mountain. About two miles further there was a little store advertising chocolate and Indian items. There was a lookout tower there, too. I remembered stopping there several times with my parents to get ice cream on the way back from Aunt Ella’s house. Ice cream was our reward for enduring th
e time we spent visiting them. Not that they were all that bad. Aunt Ella and Uncle Don were okay enough. They were just weird.
I peeked in the rearview window at Sanjay. For the most part, Prianka stayed mute, along with her brother. I can’t imagine what was going through her head, but the subtext was probably all about how I was the one who let Poopy Puppy got shredded to pieces and that her brother was now a real live zombie instead of a dead one.
I replayed the moment in my mind, when the stuffed dog was snatched away from him. There was nothing I could have done. We were in crisis mode, and Sanjay was about to get torn apart along with Poopy Puppy. Still, I should have tried harder. I should have been faster. At least that’s what I told myself Prianka was thinking.
I turned the rearview mirror slightly and caught her gaze in mine. It was steely and cold. She turned away and kept staring out the window.
Yup. I should have done a lot of things.
42
THERE WAS AN eighteen wheeler turned over in front of the entrance to Winchendon Road. The driver, who had probably been thrown from the cab, was smeared across Route 2 in a couple of pieces.
Thankfully, they didn’t move.
The coffee shop parking lot had a few poxers milling about. They watched us slow down and immediately started heading our way. A cute little house with a manicured lawn sat across the street from the coffee shop. The cab of the eighteen wheeler had fallen on a display of corn stalks, pumpkins, and gourds that sat on the edge of the property. They were mashed into the ground, and a couple of crows were pecking at the seeds.
Andrew stared at them with his black eyes and repositioned himself on Sanjay’s shoulder. He was just fine staying with us.
I pulled the van into the house’s little driveway, drove over the lawn and around the hobbled truck. Within seconds we were on the final leg of our journey.
“Welcome to apple tree world,” I said as we began passing the orchards.
Dead (A Lot) Page 15
